No laughing matter
HAMMER E TICKLE
Communism is the only political system to have created its own international brand of comedy. Of course, many communist jokes were a form of resistance. But, says Ben Lewis, they were told by the rulers as well as the ruled. Even Stalin told some funnies
words by Ben Lewis
A man dies and goes to hell. There he discovers that he has a choice: he can go to capitalist hell or to communist hell. Naturally, he wants to compare the two, so he goes over to capitalist hell. There outside the door is the devil, who looks a bit like Ronald Reagan. “What’s it like in there?” asks the visitor. “Well,” the devil replies, “in capitalist hell, they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives.”
“That’s terrible!” he gasps. “I’m going to check out communist hell!” He goes over to communist hell, where he discovers a huge queue of people waiting to get in. He waits in line. Eventually he gets to the front and there at the door to communist hell is a little old man who looks a bit like Karl Marx. “I’m still in the free world, Karl,” he says, “and before I come in, I want to know what it’s like in there.”
“In communist hell,” says Marx impatiently, “they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil, and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives.”
“But… but that’s the same as capitalist hell!” protests the visitor, “Why such a long queue?”
“Well,” sighs Marx, “Sometimes we’re out of oil, sometimes we don’t have knives, sometimes no hot water…”
It was in Romania, while making a film about Ceausescu, that I first stumbled across the historical legacy of the communist joke. There I learned that a clerk from the Bucharest transport system, Calin Bogdan Stefanescu, had spent the last 10 years of Ceausescu’s regime collecting some 900 political jokes. He was able to assert – somewhat tenuously – that there was a link between jokes and the fall of Ceausescu, since gags about the leader doubled in the last three years of the regime. The story of Stefanescu, the humour statistician, was, ironically, much funnier than the jokes themselves. It seemed to capture the prosaic reality of the little man struggling against the communist universe.
Charmed, my volume of Stefanescu’s Ten Years of Romanian Black Humour was soon joined by 30 other collections of communist jokes – such as Reinhard Wagner’s Jokes of East Germany Volume 1-2 (1994/96), and Hammer and Tickle (1980) by Petr Beckmann. The earliest volume I found, Humour Behind the Iron Curtain, was published in 1962 by Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, under the pseudonym Mischka Kukin.
Humour was an essential part of the communist experience as the monopoly of state power meant that any act of non-conformity, down to a simple turn of phrase, could be construed as a form of dissent – the Orwellian notion of the joke as “a tiny revolution”. By the same token, a joke about any facet of life became one about communism. There have been political and anti-authority jokes in every era, but nowhere else did political jokes cohere into an anonymous body of folk literature as they did under communism.
Ernst Röhl, one of East Germany’s leading satirists, told me, “Every week there was another great new joke. The strange thing is that you always asked: where do they come from? You never knew. The author was a collective – the people.”
So far as I know, no one was executed for telling a joke. But people routinely went to prison. The archives of the Hungarian secret police are full of the dossiers of people arrested for telling them.
Perhaps the most emblematic story of the joke-as-resistance is a report of the prosecution of a joke-teller in Czechoslovakia in 1967, which I found in the archives of Radio Free Europe, the anti-communist cold war broadcaster. An arriving refugee brought the news that a worker in a liquor factory had been arrested for telling the following joke: Why is the price of lard not going up in Hungary? So that the workers can have lard on bread for their Sunday lunch.
It had been overheard by the party secretary of the factory, who immediately reported the worker. He was arrested on charges of ‘Incitement and defamation against the People’s Democracy.’ After six hearings, the employee was fired. The sentence was relatively lenient because the co-workers all stood by the employee, saying that the party secretary did not hear the introductory words of the joke-teller: I heard a very stupid joke yesterday…
The joke wasn’t very funny – the implication is that since there is no meat in the shops, Sunday roasts have been replaced by lard sandwiches. But the real story gives its own punchline. Communism was a humour-producing machine. Its economic theories and system of repression created inherently funny situations. There were jokes under fascism and the Nazis too, but those systems did not create an absurd, laugh-a-minute reality like communism.
Communist jokes were a way to criticise and outmanoeuvre the system, but they were also more than this. They comprised a secret language between citizens – membership of a club to which the government was not invited (or so they thought).
The first jokes about the Russian revolution surfaced immediately after October 1917. In one, an old woman visits Moscow zoo and sees a camel for the first time. “Look what the Bolsheviks have done to that horse!” she exclaims. As the system became harsher, a distinctive communist sense of humour emerged – pithy, dark and surreal – but so did the legal machinery for repressing it. Historian Roy Medvedev looked through the files of Stalin’s political prisoners and concluded that 200,000 people were imprisoned for telling jokes, such as this: Three prisoners in the gulag get to talking about why they are there. “I am here because I always got to work five minutes late, and they charged me with sabotage,” says the first. “I am here because I kept getting to work five minutes early, and they charged me with spying,” says the second. “I am here because I got to work on time every day,” says the third, “and they charged me with owning a western watch.”
Yet there is an obvious problem with the idea that communist jokes represented an act of revolt: it wasn’t just opponents of the regime who told them. Stalin himself cracked them, including this one about a visit from a Georgian delegation: After talking to the Soviet leader, they head off down the Kremlin’s corridors. Stalin starts looking for his pipe. He can’t find it. He calls in Beria, the dreaded head of his secret police. “Go after the delegation, and find out which one took my pipe,” he says. Beria scuttles off down the corridor. Five minutes later Stalin finds his pipe under a pile of papers. He calls Beria: ”Look, I’ve found my pipe.” “It’s too late,” Beria says, “half the delegation admitted they took your pipe, and the other half died during questioning.”
Stalin’s laughter underlines the cynicism of the Soviet enterprise. But after his death the joke trials petered out. One of Khrushchev’s first acts was to release all those imprisoned for minor political crimes, which included telling jokes. In this new era, political leaders took the view that the jokes were a harmless way for people to let off steam and would help people to cope with the hardships of the difficult stage of socialism, before the communist utopia arrived. They also imagined that the jokes could be used as an early warning system; problems indicated by humour could be tackled before they caused a revolution. Ilie Merce, a senior member of the Romanian Securitate, said that he used to file reports on the jokes – who was telling what – in order to convey the popular mood to the ministry of the interior.
In the 1960s, the Soviet bloc was deluged by a flood of new jokes. There were around 20 sub categories. The most popular theme was the economy: One housewife to another: “I hear there’ll be snow tomorrow”. ”Well, I’m not queuing for that.” There were gags about Marxist-Leninist theory: Why is the individual placed in the centre of socialism? So it’s easy to kick him from all sides. There were jokes about communist-style democracy: When was the first Russian election? The time that God put Eve in front of Adam and said, “Go ahead, choose your wife.”
A joke could mock both the makers of the system and its victims. It could be an act of rebellion or a safety valve, an expression of revulsion against the system or of familiarity, even warmth towards it.
That is not to deny that the communist joke was often at its best in its dissident form. When Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, the population fought back with wit. Every night graffiti appeared in Wenceslas Square with lines like “Soviet State Circus back in town! New attractions!” People wisecracked: Why is Czechoslovakia the most neutral country in the world? Because it doesn’t even interfere in its own internal affairs. Jokes under communism were shaped by the cultures that produced them, as they are anywhere else. For the Czechs, a sense of humour encapsulated a type of national resilience. East German jokes, meanwhile, tended to be touchingly self-deprecating. And yet there was a pan-communist umbrella of comedy that stood above national distinctions. The communist joke was by nature deadpan and absurdist – because it was born of an absurd system which created a yawning gap between everyday experience and propaganda. Yet sometimes, through jokes, both communists and their opponents could carry on a debate about the failings of communism.
On this side of the Iron Curtain, the jokes were only interpreted as evidence of anti-communism; their wider significance was lost. In 1950-51, a group of Harvard anthropologists undertook one of the most influential research projects of the post-war era. The US government wanted to find out how Soviet citizens might react if the US invaded Russia. So the academics interviewed thousands of displaced Russian citizens living in camps in Germany. When asked to describe what Soviet society was like, the refugees said: “Did you hear the one about the sheep who tried to leave the USSR? They were stopped at the border by a guard…” “Why do you wish to leave Russia?” the guard asked. “It’s the secret police,” replied the sheep. “Stalin has ordered them to arrest all the elephants.” “But you aren’t elephants.” “Try telling that to the secret police.”
In the 1950s, the New York Times Magazine would devote the odd page to jokes from the Harvard project. From the 1960s onwards, volumes of communist jokes were published in paperback form in Europe and North America. Willy Brandt was a renowned communist gag-teller, but there was one western politician who took the jokes more seriously than anyone else: Ronald Reagan. He ordered the state department to collect them and send them to him in weekly memos. As a result, Paul Goble, head of the Balkan desk in the 1980s, assembled a collection of 15,000 communist jokes. Reagan often used Goble’s gags in his speeches and negotiations. When Gorbachev came to Washington, Reagan told him a communist joke. It made fun of the communist theory that a transitional era of socialism was preceding the communist utopia, and went like this: Two men are walking down a street in Moscow. One asks the other, “Is this full communism? Have we really passed through socialism and reached full communism?” The other answers “Hell, no. It’s gonna get a lot worse first.”
Jokes did not bring down communism. That was achieved by the nonsense of its economic policies, and by the decisions of the leaders of the superpowers, East and West – in the case of Reagan, by pricing the Soviets out of the arms race; in the case of Gorbachev by glasnost and perestroika. This much is well known – what isn’t is the significance both leaders attached to communist jokes. Gorbachev knew the jokes, and like his predecessors, he told them. You can’t imagine Stalin or Khrushchev telling a joke about his own unpopularity, but Gorbachev did. In 1996 he appeared on the Clive Anderson Show in Britain and told this one: A man is queuing for food in Moscow. Finally he’s had enough. He turns round to his friend and says “That’s it. I’m going to kill that Gorbachev,” and marches off. Two hours later he comes back. “Well,” says the friend, “did you do it?” “No,” replies the other, “there was an even longer queue over there.”
Exactly how communist jokes functioned politically, socially or psychologically is a question as complex as the meaning of works of art. What is self-evident, however, is that since the fall of the wall the jokes have dried up. Life just isn’t as funny any more. The vast enterprise of communism gave a universal quality to the meaning of the jokes that hasn’t been replicated since its collapse. They subverted and they supported; they undermined and they prolonged. As Gorbachev’s respect for the jokes and Reagan’s obsession with them show, they were intrinsic to the whole communist experience.
Jokes may not have carried the weight of the great forces that ended communism, but they were more than mere figures of speech. They kept the idea of an alternative reality alive in the minds of Soviet citizens, and they made light of four decades of occupation of eastern and central Europe. They may even explain why the end of communism was so sudden and so bloodless. No point anyone getting hurt over a little joke, right?
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